The
international ACRE initiative
provides an umbrella that links together some 40+ projects, institutions,
organisations, and data rescue and climate applications activities around the
globe -

In
support of its first role in providing an international umbrella to facilitate,
coordinate and undertake historical surface terrestrial and marine instrumental
data recovery, imaging, digitization, quality control, archiving, access and
preservation in a sustainable manner, ACRE
is also developing a range of regional data foci as follows:

As with all of ACRE’s
international activities and regional foci (noted above), the historical
instrumental weather observations will feed into international terrestrial and
marine weather data repositories, and will be freely available.

These data will in turn be assimilated into all
reanalyses (http://reanalyses.org/),
especially the freely available 3D global dynamical historical weather
reanalyses (see current timeline on the next page) of its main US partner, the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric
Administration (NOAA) Earth System Research Laboratory (ESRL) and Cooperative Institute for Research in
Environmental Sciences (CIRES) at the
University of Colorado,-the ACRE-facilitated
20th Century Reanalysis (20CR).

Dynamical
downscaling by the Met Office PRECIS
(http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/precis) team dynamical models will then take 20CR output down to finer resolution (25 km to 100 m), for use by
the climate science community, wide ranging climate applications and services,
policy makers, planners, environmental managers, educational and public sectors
- the schematic on the next page provides an overview of the full ACRE initiative.

The
20CR ensemble mean and spread fields
are freely available via the NOAA ESRL and CIRES CDC
(http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/psd/data/gridded/data.20thC_ReanV2.html), the NCAR Research Data Archive
(http://rda.ucar.edu/datasets/ds131.1/), the NERSC Science Gateways (every-member netCDF4 files:
portal.nersc.gov), and NERSC HPSS
Science Gateway (every-member GRIB files:
http://portal.nersc.gov/cgi-bin/get_tape?/home/projects/incite11/www).Eventually, all of 20CR outputs will be available on this British Atmospheric Data Centre (BADC) WWW site that is still being
developed and finalised - the top level catalogue entry can be seen at: http://badc.nerc.ac.uk/view/badc.nerc.ac.uk__ATOM__DE_6ae84cbc-177b-11e2-9c9c-00163e251233

The following link is to papers published in the
literature that have referred to and/or used 20CR:

The link at the end of this sentence, is to a set
of visualisations of the results of both ACRE’s
historical weather data activities plus 20CR
outputs that are dynamically generated from the historical weather observations
that ACRE and its partners recover,
image and digitise:https://vimeo.com/channels/345571

How does
interdisciplinary collaboration benefit ACRE and its users?

As shown below, ACRE also links closely with Citizen
Science, Social Sciences, Humanities and Arts projects, which extend its
activities far beyond climate science into inter/cross/multidisciplinary
engagements, and provide the basis for access to expertise for training in data rescue, scanning and digitisation tools
and techniques for analyses and interpretation of historical documentary
weather observations. This is an ongoing
ACRE activity evolving as the initiative
itself grows and expands its interactions and collaborations.

Currently,
the initiative is part of two new proposals to the UK Arts & Humanities Research Council (AHRC) ‘Environmental Change and Sustainability area of the Care for the Future’ theme:

Climate
Histories of the West African MonsoonLed by Professor David
Nash, University of Brighton, UK

Representing
and communicating uncertainty: climate change and risk Led
by Professor Georgina Endfield, University of Nottingham, UK

In what
collaborative work is ACRE already involved?

As shown on the previous page, the international
ACRE initiative, by its very nature, already embraces inter/cross/multidisciplinary
engagements and collaborations under the following specific data rescue and
related activities.

Although at various stages of development, when
taken together, ACRE’s most coherent regional data rescue foci, ACRE Chile, ACRE Pacific, ACRE China,
ACRE India, ACRE Africa and ACRE SE Asia,
already effectively cover a large part of the globe and embrace a strong inter/cross/multidisciplinary
network.

ACRE
Chile was the first regional foci
developed under ACRE, and is part of the EU
FP7 European Reanalysis of Global Climate Observations (ERA-CLIM) project (http://www.era-clim.eu/) (see map below, including ACRE collaborations
with other partners in ERA-CLIM)
with the digitisation of historical Chilean terrestrial and marine weather
observations being coordinated by the Universidad del Pacifico in Santiago.Several visits to Chile since 2009, have
paved the way for these activities and the identification of over 6,000 Chilean
ship logbooks with historical weather observations in them in the period from
1860, similarly around 100 lighthouse records over a similar time frame, and
potentially huge amounts of hydrographical data for the seas bordering Chile.

These data rescue and
digitisation activities have since been expanded under a French Pacific Fund project in 2011-2012 involving Météo-France in
both New Caledonia and French Polynesia.An ongoing project under ACRE
Pacific, Samoa Archive Rescue and
Development, is focusing on the recovery, imaging and digitisation of old
German colonial weather observations from the old Apia Observatory, which are
held by the Samoa Meteorological Services (SMS) (see panel below for the
potential data recovery from the wider SW Pacific domain).This is a joint activity between ACRE Pacific, the SMS, NIWA, and both the University of Giessen and Deutscher
Wetterdienst (DWD) in Germany.

In
2008, the then Met Office Hadley Centre’s
Integrated Climate Program and a UK AHRCKnowledge Catalyst Scheme grant
allowed ACRE to fund an initiative
in conjunction with Bristol University’s Chinese
Maritime Customs Project (http://www.bristol.ac.uk/history/customs/), to produce an inventory of sources of historical
Chinese and South China Sea region terrestrial and marine daily to sub-daily
meteorological data.Building on from
this, a new ACRE-BristolUniversity collaboration via the
British Inter-university China Centre
(BICC), funded by the AHRC's Language Based Area Studies Scheme, is now in
place as part of its 2012-14 Phase 2 activities. The new initiative will form
one of BICC's partnerships for knowledge exchange with business and public
policy organisations.A Chinese-speaking
postdoctoral researcher will support the initiative, and provide liaison
between ACRE and the ACRE China team as it sets up
operations, and in particular will look to develop relationships with other
repositories in China holding historic data, particularly in Shanghai.

As of 2012-13, the above ACRE-Bristol University collaboration will link into an ACRE China regional focus that is part
of a new Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) between the Met Office and the Chinese
Meteorological Administration/Beijing Climate Centre (CMA/BCC).Current ACRE
digitisation activities are focusing on the wider South China Sea region over
the period before World War 2 (WW2), using the historical weather observations
published in old Chinese newspapers and by both the Hong Kong Observatory and
the Jesuit observatory in Shanghai (see station distribution on the next page).
Future plans are being developed in conjunction with CMA/BCC for further
engagements under the framework of the international ACRE
initiative in the new MoU.

ACRE China will also work closely with ACRE SE Asia (see below) and the National Meteorological Services
of the Netherlands and Indonesia (KNMI-BMKG)
Digitisasi Data Historis (DiDaH)
project (http://www.didah.org/).Such
interactions will allow ACRE China to utilise the data repository developed by
DiDaH, the Southeast Asian Climate
Assessment and Dataset (SACA&D) (http://saca-bmkg.knmi.nl/). This will also involve ACRE’s main Japanese data
rescue partner, and their developing Japan-Asia
Climate Data Project (JCDP) to recover and digitise meteorological
data from historical Japanese mainland, various Japanese colonial territories
in China and Korea during WW2, plus counties and islands in the NW Pacific.

Under ACRE
India, apart from activities linked to the UK AHRC-funded Network Project:Collaborative research on the
meteorological and botanical history of the Indian Ocean, 1600-1900, the
initiative’s other efforts have been in trying to develop an MoU, or similar,
with the Indian Meteorological
Department (IMD)/Indian Ministry of
Earth Sciences (aided by the UK FCO in New Delhi), respond to interest by
the Sri Lankan Meteorological Service
in a data rescue project, and develop a specific data rescue task with ‘The Mauritius Project’ (outlined on the
next page).The latter is now likely to
be part of a wider project looking at renewable off-shore wind energy
potentials for the Government of Mauritius through an enhancement of the
historical regional marine weather data feeding into dynamically downscaled
(using the PRECIS system) 20CR and SIRCA/OARCA reanalyses across the region.

With
ACRE Africa, apart from more
integration with the new Met Office Hadley
Centre-UK DfiD Climate Science Research Partnership (CSRP) contract, the
initiative is part of a Met Office funding proposal to DfiD for a major data
rescue project for the Tanzanian Meteorological Agency, is looking to
link with Germany's National Meteorological Service, the Deutscher
Wetterdienst (DWD), with their Southern African Science Service Centre
for Climate Change and Adaptive Land Management (SASSCAL) - a Regional
Science Service Centre (RSSC) in Southern Africa project (http://www.sasscal.org/) involving Angola, Botswana, Namibia, South Africa
and Zambia in southern Africa, is working with the South African Weather
Service on data rescue in their country, and looking to link with the International
Research Institute for Climate and Society (IRI) and the expansion of the
concept of their IRI-Google.org project (http://portal.iri.columbia.edu/portal/server.pt?open=18&objID=7959&qid=44812383&rank=1&parentname=SearchResult&parentid=21&mode=2&in_hi_userid=2&cached=true), Building
Capacity to Produce and Use Climate and Environmental Information for Improving
Health in East Africa, to other areas of the African continent.

Finally, the
initiative is working to develop an ACRE
SE Asia data rescue and regional foci, ‘kicking off’ with a joint workshop
involving the National Meteorological Services of the Netherlands and Indonesia
(KNMI-BMKG) DiDaH project (http://www.didah.org/) at the Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia (UKM) in
Kuala Lumpur in 2014.Funding proposals
to support such activities have been made to the APN CAPaBLE call (ACRE SE
Asia – towards new weather and climate baselines for assessing weather and
climate extremes, impacts and risks over SE Asia), and to the UK FCO in
Singapore in response to a request from them for an environmental network
meeting in the region (Environmental
History and Bio-diversity in Southeast Asia: A Collaborative Workshop). The
panel above shows the aims of ACRE SE
Asia, and the potential for using the 20CR
output to assess weather extremes and climate drivers across the region
(further refinement through PRECIS
system-downscaling of 20CR output is
also being developed).